It's About That Time Again

November 27, 2012

About 37 hours after the Election Day polls closed this month, I got to sit down with Texas Senator Dan Patrick and Texas Tribune Chief Honcho Evan Smith (an informal title) to talk about the election, the upcoming legislative session and what it all means for Texas.

It was a fun morning (though some of that was probably sleep deprivation or election-related brain damage). The legislative session starts just six weeks from today, and our talk, which you can watch here, offered a pretty good preview of the political and philosophical lines that will help define it.

As I say so often, I deeply love Texas – I love its people, its culture, its natural beauty and its history.

I also think Texas can do better. The state can do a much better job being honest and transparent about the challenges and opportunities we face, and it can be smarter and more open about how we deal with them.

So I think next year’s session will be driven by one basic question: will those in control of the Capitol do better for the families, business owners and children of Texas?

What “doing better” means

It seems like an easy question, right? Of course Texas should do better for its people and do what it needs to do to ensure that our future is brighter than our present.Of course Texas should reform state government with honest accounting and far more transparency.Of course the state should be working around-the-clock on a permanent funding solution for our public schools.

And of course we should advance a first-class economic vision for middle-class Texans that restores necessities to seniors and children, invests in education from pre-kindergarten to college, helps small businesses at least as much as big corporations, and makes Texas a national leader in new energy as much as we are in fossil fuels.

The questions

Except that, if you watch the video, it’s not clear that those in control of this state would take Texas in a direction that most Texans would consider better. And that raises some questions:

Will we strengthen the system of public schools that our founders fought to create and our parents and grandparents worked to build? Or will the legislature attack certain schools, weaken the system overall and dodge accountability for the problems it helped create?

Will we seize a historic opportunity to help our neighbors and families get the health coverage they need – while at the same time fueling our economy and recouping billions of the federal tax dollars we’ve sent to Washington? Or will those in control cling to the same mistakes that have left Texas with the highest rate of uninsured in the nation?

Will we ensure that we’re respecting women, Hispanics and others who will play such a vital role in Texas’ future? Or will those in control just talk in patronizing generalizations about their fellow Texans while pushing an agenda that marginalizes folks who need to be at the center of the state’s priorities?

The next six months (or so) will help decide how Texas answers those questions. And I’ll be writing much more in the coming weeks and months about what we’re doing to make Texas better – and how things are going at the Capitol.

Stay tuned and, please, stay involved. The election was only the beginning.